The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

Chapter 2
    Monday, 2nd May 2005
    Allan Karlsson hesitated as he stood in the flowerbed that ran along one side of the Old People’s Home. He was wearing a brown jacket with brown trousers and on his feet he had a pair of brown indoor slippers. He was not a trendsetter; people rarely are at that age. He was on the run from his own birthday party, another unusual thing for a hundred-year-old, not least because even being one hundred is pretty rare.
    Allan thought about whether he should make the effort to crawl back in through the window to get his hat and shoes, but when he felt his wallet in his inside pocket, he decided that that would suffice. Besides, Director Alice had repeatedly shown that she had a sixth sense (wherever he hid his vodka, she found it), and she might be nosing around in his room even now, suspicious that something fishy was going on.
    Better to be on his way while he could, Allan thought, as he stepped out of the flowerbed on creaking knees. In his wallet, as far as he could remember, he had a few hundred-crown notes saved – a good thing since he’d need some cash if he was going into hiding.
    He turned to take one last look at the Old People’s Home that – until a few moments ago – he had thought would be his last residence on Earth, and then he told himself that he could die some other time, in some other place.
    The hundred-year-old man set off in his pee-slippers (so called because men of an advanced age rarely pee further than their shoes), first through a park and then alongside an open field where a market was occasionally held in the otherwise quiet provincial town. After a few hundred metres, Allan went around the back of the district’s medieval church and sat downon a bench next to some gravestones to rest his aching knees. It wasn’t such a religious town that Allan worried about being disturbed in the churchyard. He noted an ironic coincidence. He was born the same year as a Henning Algotsson who lay beneath the stone just across from his bench. But there was an important difference – Henning had given up the ghost sixty-one years earlier. If Allan had been more curious he might have wondered what Henning had died of, at the age of thirty-nine. But Allan left other people to themselves, dead or alive. He always had and he always would.
    Instead, he thought that he had probably been mistaken all those years when he’d sat in the Old People’s Home, feeling that he might as well die and leave it all. However many aches and pains he suffered, it had to be much more interesting and instructive to be on the run from Director Alice than to be lying rigid six feet under.
    Upon which thought the Birthday Boy, despite his complaining knees, got up and said goodbye to Henning Algotsson and continued on his badly planned flight.
    Allan cut across the churchyard to the south, until a stone wall appeared in his path. It wasn’t more than a metre high, but Allan was a centenarian, not a high jumper. On the other side was Malmköping’s bus station and the old man suddenly realised that his rickety legs were taking him towards a building that could be very useful. Once, many years earlier, Allan had crossed the Himalayas. That was no picnic. Allan thought about that experience now, as he stood before the last hurdle between himself and the station. He considered the matter so intently that the stone wall seemed to shrink before his eyes. And when it was at its very lowest, Allan crept over it, age and knees be damned.
    Malmköping is not what you’d call a bustling town, and this sunny weekday morning was no exception. Allan hadn’t seena living soul since he had suddenly decided not to show up at his own hundredth birthday party. The station waiting room was almost empty when Allan shuffled in. Almost. On the right were two ticket windows, one closed. Behind the other sat a little man with small, round glasses, thin hair combed to one side, and a uniform waistcoat. The man gave him an irritated look as he raised his eyes from his computer screen. Perhaps he felt the waiting room was becoming too crowded, because over in the corner there was already another person, a young man of slight build, with long greasy blond hair, a scraggly beard and a denim jacket with the words Never Again on the back.
    It seemed as if the young man might not be able to read, since he was pulling the door of the handicapped toilet, even though there was a sign saying ‘Out of order’.
    After a